News Classification System. From the creators of the OpenDirectory Project comes their new effort: a classifying news crawler : Topix.net. They've got some cool text processing that allows them to classify each story in terms of content and geographic location. Very cool ideas in agreggation! [MetaFilter]

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great stuff

The Trafficking of Women. Guardian Weekly | UK Trafficker Jailed for 10 years A former asylum seeker in the UK, who is now a UK citizen, has been handed a 10 year jail term for trafficking women to the UK for the purposes of… [Flailing in the Surf]

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it wasn't that long ago, maybe 98 or 99 that they prosecuted one of these cases in maryland. last year they were still working on the major albanian/italy trafficking and prostitution problem. the thing is that people are taking advantage of people here. prostitution if freely chosen is a valid choice for people, but when it is forced, then i have real problems, in fact, it is tantamount to slavery which to me should be punishable by hard labor for the enslavers. in short, we need to as a society ensure this doesn't happen anymore, so britain needs to prosecute the cases.

Stringing Along. Remember Cats Cradle? No, you literate devil you, not Kurt Vonnegut's Cats Cradle. Cats Cradle the game – the two-player version of the activity more properly known as String Figures. As in those described in the Arctic String Figure Project – The Diamond [Bernie DeKoven's Blog o'Fun]

Now It's On!. The Tina/Lane Drive to Keep Everyone We Know From Ever Shopping At Wal-Mart is on. More to come…. [Eat Your Vegetables]

Will IPv6 conversion fail in the US?. Simson Garfinkel has a cautionary article about IPv6 in the latest issue of MIT's Technology Review: “The Net Effect.” He points out that while packet-level encryption will be the norm in IPv6, transmission through today's routers is likely to be… [InternetPolicy.net]

Got a science-y person in your life? Can't figure out a good gift? If you're willing to spend a bit (ie: the person is family, best friend, or partner) I'd highly recommend a subscription to New Scientist (www.newscientist.com). Sharp, challenging, endlessly interesting, and with good broad appeal to anyone who likes science, technology, and science issues. I finally got a subscription myself and must say it's one of the best purchases I've made this year. It's a weekly so it's always fresh news. [[ t e c h n o \ c u l t u r e ]]

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I have to agree with this, NewScientist is one of my favorite reads of late. they give you the lowdown on what's happening in the front, and then give you nice articles in the back, then behind that i like the call the 'gossip section' also known as who else is trying to hire the scientists that you are trying to hire, thejob advertisement. which much like the job advertisements in the economist can be very enlightening if you are in certain circles or at least following certain circles.

Flat. I left the office, late last night, to find I had a flat tire.
In fact, I had two flat tires. One of the flat tires is less than a week old. [Mark Bernstein]

“US loses its tourism allure”. Fewer and fewer Norwegians are opting to spend their holidays in the United States. A new survey indicates that half of all questioned view the US as an unattractive travel destination. (Aftenposten) Travel bureau Berg-Hansen commissioned the survey and was… [The Practical Nomad]

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this just figures…. it figures to be just about right. i wouldn't come here if i was living elsewhere unless i had too, look at what we do to people… even our own citizens, and we've recently been caught repatriating people inappropriately, leading to 'torture by proxie' in other states. most rational people would go someplace safe and interesting instead of here, someplace with a rational leadership.

is this article on attrition in graduate school or is it a subtle argument for removing money from graduate education?

He also calculated that Notre Dame would save $1-million a year in stipends alone if attrition went down by 10 percent, because programs would not over-enroll students to compensate for attrition. “We don't mind spending if there's a product at the end,” he says.

why is science the model of goodness here?

“One reason the sciences have lower attrition rates is that you are admitted to be in the Joe Schmoe lab,” she says. You and Professor Schmoe “have spent some time getting to know each other and vet each other.” That's quite different, she says, from a student who plans to study international labor economics but, after doing years of course work, realizes that there is no one in the department for him to work with

i posit that the key to the lab experience is not the doctor, but the logical outcomes of expected labor. in good labs, people have a path, it is clear, and they can work it. this is not always true in all labs, nor is it always true in any discipline, but by combining that with the likelihood that there are graduate student mentors in your lab that you can model, things get 'easier'.

Ms. Golde emphasizes that this is another way that the sciences are structured differently from the humanities. In a science department, students are in the lab from the start, working next to undergraduates, researchers, and professors. In English, on the other hand, the first couple of years of graduate school are taken up mostly with classes. “It's just like being a supercharged English undergraduate,” she says. “It's not anything like being an English professor.”

nor should it be, just like a science or engineering graduate student might be not like a professor, but more like a laboratory assistant.

it is entirely unclear to me what the problem with attrition is other than money… at least from the institutions view, from the view of faculty and student, there is alot of emotional investment, but i'm not sure the arguments made in the article really hold water at all.